> The data also reveals a misalignment in resource allocation. More than half of generative AI budgets are devoted to sales and marketing tools, yet MIT found the biggest ROI in back-office automation—eliminating business process outsourcing, cutting external agency costs, and streamlining operations.
Makes sense. The people in charge of setting AI initiatives and policies are office people and managers who could be easily replaced by AI, but the people in charge not going to let themselves be replaced. Salesmen and engineers are the hardest to replace, yet they aren't in charge so they get replaced the fastest.
I think this is being overly complimenting to AI. I think the most obvious reason is that for almost all business use cases its not very helpful. All these initiatives have the same problem. Staff asking 'how can this actually help me,' because they can't get it to help them other than polishing emails, polishing code, and writing summaries which is not what most people's jobs are. Then you have to proofread all of this because AI makes a lot of mistakes and poor assumptions, on top of hallucinations.
I dont think Joe and Jane worker are purposely not using to protect their jobs, everyone wants ease at work, its just these LLM-based AI's dont offer much outside of some use cases. AI is vastly over-hyped and now we're in the part of the hype cycle where people are more comfortable saying to power, "This thing you love and think will raise your stock price is actually pretty terrible for almost all the things you said it would help with."
AI has its place, but its not some kind of universal mind that will change everything and be applicable in significant and fundamentally changing ways outside of some narrow use cases.
I'm on week 3 of making a video game (something I've never done before) with Claude/Chat and once I got past the 'tutorial level' design, these tools really struggle. I think even where an LLM would naturally be successful (structured logical languages), its still very underwhelming. I think we're just seeing people push back on hype and feeling empowered to say "This weird text autogenerator isn't helping me."
3D apps are particularly bad for AI. The LLMs are fantastic at web apps that produce an HTML DOM. But they suck at generating code for a 3D app that needs rendering, game logic, physics and similar stuff. All of that is much more complicated than a DOM. Plus, there is 100x the amount of training data for web apps. It is similarly harder to test 3D apps. Testing web code is glorious. You can access the UI via the DOM, execute events, and then check the DOM for success. None of that is possible in 3D, where there is just an image and a mouse, and no way to find and push a button or check the results. A few of the LLM IDEs allow you to add images, which could really help cross this gap, but most do not, and those that do are not designed to be able to detect rendering artifacts, or detect if a given object is in the right place.
Part of it is that the bosses often don't know what they want, so they leave the details up to marketing or whoever, so replacing marketing or whoever with AI would mean figuring out what they want. The boss can tell marketing, "Make a brochure for new product ABC," and marketing can run with that and present him with a mock-up, he can make a couple revisions, they shine it up based on those, and then they're done. To replace them completely with AI, he would have to provide a lot more guidance and it would take more iterations to get a correct result that he likes. It wouldn't be completely unlike the current process, but it would demand more of him, which wouldn't make him happy.
Last week I was talking to my boss about a project I've been working on for him, and he asked whether AI could help me with it to save time. I pointed out that a lot of the holdup in the project has been his not knowing exactly what he wants (because he's not sure what the software we're working with can do until I do it and show it to him), and an AI can't tell him what he wants any more than I can. Sometimes you just have to do the work, and technology can't help you.
There is a reason why sales and marketing is first. It has to do with hallucination.
People have figured out that even if you mess up sales/support/marketing, worse case you apologize and give a gift coupon. And then there is also the verbose nature of LLMs which makes it better suited to write marketing copies etc.
On business process outsourcing like customer support lot of companies are using LLMs, so that part is unclear to me.
Other BPO processes are accounting & finance, IT, human resources etc. And while companies can take that hallucination risk for customers, they see it as a serious risk. If for example, the accounting and finance operations get messed up due to AI hallucination companies will be in real hot water. Same goes for other back office functions like HR, compliance etc. So, most likely this statement is just hogwash.
companies that use LLM for support already were pretty deep in the woods with some outsourced unfortunate agent behind the curtains, so they replaced one not very good solution with an even worse, but cheaper one.
and since the whole world was (is) doing it at the same time customers doesn't really had a choice. (but of course having real support is still a differentiator in the market.)
> MIT found the biggest ROI in back-office automation
Can't find any source to this, even after searching in Google. To me who knows bit of this, I don't find it very believable. Compared to humans, AI struggles in places where a fixed structure and process is required.
Why do you think most people inherit nothing? Every person I know who has had an immediate family member die has received some sort of inheritance, though sometimes not a very valuable one. Do you have a citation for your very strong claim?
It’s crazy easy to Google that claim, why not try that first? “Every person I know” is also known as type of ‘survivor bias’. Googling, I get multiple answers that 30%-40% of US citizens get any inheritance, which is a minority. Here’s one of them: https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2011/pdf/ec110030.p...
because for most inheiritance is a rounding error. Either I happens far too late in life and so you are already set or it is distributed between so many others your share is insignificant.
When my grandmother-in-law passes away, my father-in-law will be about 500k+ “in the hole” because he will receive nothing, and has housed them for the past 25 years, in addition to paying for care, GIL has dementia.
Congrats on not having to take out a loan. Most people aren't that lucky.
Most people taking out student loans are still teenagers. Does anyone really expect a teenager to make good financial decisions? Also, most people can't get a solid job without going to college, so they're forced to take out loans.
That "negligence subsidy" is really helping people who were put in an unfair situation by colleges and banks.
While LLMs are in generally fairly good at recalling bible verses, they can't do it perfectly. If the Bible truly is the infallible word of God that we believe, then shouldn't we use more caution than just "welp, sometimes it makes mistakes"?
You could counter this by saying a person can't remember Bible verses, and this is true, but a person usually recognizes when they can't remember something instead of making something up. If you asked me to recall any random Bible verses, chances are I wouldn't be able to do so. However, unlike an LLM, I would admit I don't know for sure and I would pull out a Bible or look online for an authoritative source rather than adlibbing something on the spot.
"Can. 747 §1. The Church, to which Christ the Lord has entrusted the deposit of faith so that with the assistance of the Holy Spirit it might protect the revealed truth reverently, examine it more closely, and proclaim and expound it faithfully, has the duty and innate right, independent of any human power whatsoever, to preach the gospel to all peoples, also using the means of social communication proper to it." From a Catholic perspective, it is the duty of the Church to share the good news and therefore it is also the duty of the Church to protect it against misinformation (heresies). More specifically, the faithful who have received the sacrament of confirmation have the "power to profess faith in Christ publicly and as it were officially" (CCC 1305, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas) and the spiritual wellbeing of the faithful is the responsibility of the diocesan bishops and the whole Church hierarchy (Jn 21:15-25, per the Catholic interpretation of those verses).
Because an LLM does not have a soul and cannot receive the sacrament of confirmation it has no power to spread the gospel. Furthermore, it would be irresponsible for a bishop to approve of the use of an apologetic chatbot, even if it were only trained on the arguments of confirmed faithful, because its thinking cannot be explained coherently.
For those asking "Why does this even matter?", remember: the salvation of souls is at stake.
Sure, but it starts to get hard a few days in so beginners won't be able to finish. However, I think that makes it an amazing learning opportunity. There's plenty of write-ups on solutions on the internet.
I see the good intentions, but it's too idealistic. In many families both parents work and kids are expected to get home by themselves (such was the case for me from 3rd grade onwards). Smartphones are simply a necessity for communication and Google Maps. I can only ever see this working with upper middle class nuclear families with a stay at home parent.
Why would you need Google Maps to get home from school? I have an absolutely terrible sense of direction, but even I can memorize a single route after walking it a couple of times.
Or ... we could continue doing what worked for all of us before being tethered to phones. Communicate beforehand / afterwards / using shared phones (which still exist) and learning to navigate the world using brains.
Almost all of that can be done offline. Pen and paper still exist. Example 1 is more difficult without a phone of your own, I was able to use a pay phone back in the day. Everything else you listed can be accomplished offline, on a computer, or by asking to use the school's phone for 1 minute. I mean, if the accident happened at school, the office may very well contact you themselves.
Yes, it can be more convenient but it absolutely isn't necessary.
The parent comment is almost an advertisement for waiting to give kids a smartphone until they're older. If one truly can't imagine doing any of these without post-2010 technology, then it would be good giving kids a little bit more time building their independence from both parents and smartphones.
Aspirational at best I'm afraid. What happens when the other partner/parent/family member isn't responsible, smashing your plans? Or if the event has a variable end time with no safe care or phone in between? How do you deal with emergencies like school closures that now require every child to line up to use available landlines (my personal favorite experience)?
Landlines are becoming scant in my particular part of my country, YMMV. I rarely even see them in my workplace anymore.
I walked the mile home from school from the age of five. Why would anyone need a map? And I spent all day outside away from home from the age of about eight in the summer with of course no phone of any kind and no maps even though I was tramping for miles through fields and streets. What has changed in the last sixty years that makes maps and communication a necessity?
A lot of this can be said for most, if not all, of the stolen-Paganism claims, not Halloween. If you excuse the inherent bias, Fr. Casey Cole has a good recent video on the matter, however, he focuses more on Christmas than Halloween: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpYNQgb_IAE
Ironically, most of the anti-Christian and Pagan symbols you see today were actually copied from Christianity. The upside down cross was originally the Cross of St. Peter (St. Peter asked to be crucified upside down because he thought himself unworthy to die as Christ did), until anti-Christians used it in intentionally sacrilegious mock-rituals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mass).
> If you excuse the inherent bias, Fr. Casey Cole has a good recent video on the matter, however, he focuses more on Christmas than Halloween: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpYNQgb_IAE
History for Atheists has posts on 'pagan origin' topics:
No one needs 100,000 LOC for a blog. A while back I wrote a blog generator for myself that took one markdown file per post and a template and turned it into a directory of static HTML files. The whole thing is 46 lines of shell script. The only dependency is a markdown parser.
I truly mean no offense by this: do you think that has something to do with why Josh’s blog has more readers than yours by probably many orders of magnitude?
He has way less readers than an almost infinite amount of blogs with 1/10 the lines of code so your argument proves nothing. And today Josh is losing a lot of readers that can't *READ* his blog. Because it is terribly developed, although it looks shiny (when it unfreezes).
My argument is that Josh has a lot of readers because it's clear that he puts a lot of time and effort into writing a great blog, and the code plays an important part. Obviously code isn't crucial to writing any successful blog (although in Josh's case it is) but my guess is that most of the people who see their hacked-up-and-spit-out homegrown blogging system as a positive put a similar amount of effort into that content. (See also "static gen basin": https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/)
Anyway, you seem to have an axe to grind here, so I'm ducking out. Have a nice day!
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